But the theme of marriage is an image of such univer-

sality that it also has a deeper meaning. It is an acceptable,

even necessary, symbolic discovery of the feminine com-
ponent of a man's own psyche, just as much as it is the
acquisition of a real wife. So one may encounter this
archetype in a man of any age in response to a suitable
stimulus.
Not all women, however, react trustingly to the married
state. A woman patient who had unfulfilled longings for
a career,. which she had had to give up for a very difficult
and short-lived marriage, dreamed that she was kneeling
opposite a man who was also kneeling. He had a ring that
he prepared to put on her finger, but she stretched out
her right-hand ring finger;in a tensemanner--evidently
resisting this ritual of marital union ..
It was easy to point out her significant error. Instead
of offering the left-hand ring finger (by which she could
accept a balanced and natural relation to the masculine
principle) she had wrongly assumed that she had to put
her entire conscious (Le., right-sided) identity in the serv-
ice of the man. In fact, marriage required her to share
with him only that subliminal, natural (Le., left-sided)
part of herself in which the principle of union would
have a symbolic, not a literal or absolute meaning. Her
fear was the fear of the woman who dreads to lose her
identity in a strongly patriarchal marriage, which this
woman had good reason to resist.
Nevertheless, the sacred marriage as an archetypal
form has a particularly important meaning for the psy-
chology of women, and one for which they are prepared
during their adolescence by many preliminary events of
an initiatory character.
Beauty and the Beast
Girls in our society share in the masculine hero myths
because, like boys, they must also develop a reliable ego-
identity and acquire an education. But there is an older
layer of the mind that seems to come to the surface in
their feelings, with the aim of making them into women,
not into imitation men. When this ancient content of the
psyche begins to make its appearance, the modern young
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woman may repress it because it threatens to cut her off
from the emancipated equality of friendship and oppor-
tunity to compete with men that have become her modern
privileges.
This repression may be so successful that for a time she
will maintain an identification with the masculine intellec-
tual goals she learned at school or college. Even when
she marries, she will preserve some illusion of freedom,
despite her ostensible act of submission to the archetype
of marriage-with its implicit injunction to become a
mother. And so there may occur, as we very frequently
see today, that conflict which in the end forces the woman
to rediscover her buried womanhood in a painful (but
ultimately rewarding) manner.
I saw an example of this in a young married woman
who did not yet have any children but who intended to
have one or two eventually, because it would be expected
of her. Meanwhile her sexual response was unsatisfactory.
This worried her and her husband, though they were
unable to offer any explanation for it. She had graduated
with honors from a good woman's college and enjoyed a
life of intellectual companionship wi\h her husband and
other men. While this side of her life went well enough
much of the time, she had occasional outbursts of temper
and talked in an aggressive fashion that alienated men
and gave her an intolerable feeling of dissatisfaction with
herself.
She had a dream at this time that seemed so important
she sought professional advice to understand it. She
dreamed she was in a line of young women like herself,
and as she looked ahead to where they were going she
saw that as each came to the head of the line she was
decapitated by a guillotine. Without any fear the dreamer
remained in the line, presumably quite willing to submit
to the same treatment when her turn came.
I explained to her that this meant she was ready to
give up the habit of "living in her head"; she must learn
to free her body to discover its natural sexual response
and the fulfillment of its biological role in motherhood.
The dream expressed this as the need to make a drastic
change; she had to sacrifice the "masculine" hero role.
As one might expect, this educated woman had no dif-
ficulty in accepting this interpretation at an intellectual
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level, and she set about trying to change herself into a
more submissive kind of woman. She did then improve
her love-life and became the mother of two very satis-
factory children. As she grew to know herself better, she
began to see that for a man (or the masculine-trained
mind in women) life is something that has to be taken by
storm, as an act of the heroic will; but for a woman to feel
right about 'herself, life is best realized by a process of
awakening.
A universal myth expressing this kind of awakening is
found in the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast. The best
known version of this story relates how Beauty, the
youngest of four daughWrs, becomes her father's favorite
because of her unselfish goodness. When she asks her
father only for a white rose, instead of the more costly
presents demanded by the others, she is aware only of her
inner sincerity of feeling. She does not know that she is
about to endanger her father's life and her ideal relation
with him. For he steals the white rose from the enchanted
garden of Beast, who is stirred to anger by the theft and
requires him to return in three months for his punishment,
presumably death.
(In allowing the father this reprieve to go home with
his gift, Beast behaves out of character, especially when
he also offers to send him a trunk full of gold when he
gets home. As Beauty's father comments, the Beast seems
cruel and kind at the same time.)
Beauty insists upon taking her father's punishment and
returns after three months to the enchanted castle. There
she is given a beautiful room where she has no worries
and nothing to fear except the occasional visits of Beast,
who repeatedly comes to ask her if she will someday
marry him. She always refuses. Then, seeing in a magic
mirror a picture of her father lying ill, she begs Beast to
allow her to return to comfort him, promising to return
in li week. Beast tells her that he will die if she deserts
him, but she may go for a week..
At home, her radiant presence brings joy to her father
and envy to her sisters, who plot to detain her longer
than her promised stay. At length she dreams that Beast
is dying of despair. So,. realizing she has overstayed her
time, she returns to resuscitate him.
Quite forgetting the dying Beast's ugliness, Beauty min-
130
isters to him. He tells her that he was unable to live
without her, and that he will die happy now that she has
~turned. But Beauty realizes that she cannot live without
. Beast, that she has fallen in love with him. She tells him
so, and promises to be his wife if only he will not die.
At this the castle is filled with a blaze of light and the
sound of music, and Beast disappears. In his place stands
a handsome prince, who tells Beauty that he had been
enchanted by a witch and turned into the Beast. The spell
was ordained to last until a beautiful girl should love
Beast for his goodness alone.
In this story, if we unravel the symbolism, we are likely
to see that Beauty is any young girl or woman who has
entered into an emotional bond with her father, no less
binding because of its spiritual nature. Her goodness is
symbolized by her request for a white rose, but in a sig-
nificant twist of meaning her unconscious intention puts
her father and then heI:self in the power of a principle
that expresses not goodness alone, but cruelty and kind-
ness combined. It is as if she wished to be rescued from
a love holding her to an exclusively virtuous and unreal
attitude.
By learning to love Beast she awaj(ens to the power of
human love concealed in its animal (and therefore im-
perfect) but genuinely erotic form. Presumably this rep-
resents an awakening of her true function of relatedness,
enabling her to accept the' erotic component of her original
wish, which had to be repressed because of a fear of incest.
To leave her father she had, as it were, to accept the
incest-fear, to allow herself to live in its presence in fan-
tasy until she could get to know the animal man and dis-
cover her own true response to it as a woman.
In this way she redeems herself and her image of the
masculine from the forces of repression, bringing to con-
sciousness her capacity to trust her love as something
that combines spirit and nature in the best sense of the
words.
A dream of an emancipated woman patient of mine
represented this need to remove the incest-fear, a very
real fear in this patient's thoughts, because of her father's
over-close attachment to her following his wife's death.
The dream showed her being chased by a furious bull.
She fled at first, but realized it was no use. She fell and
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